Affective Force Fields in Urban Space – SPACEFORCE

We collect cultural affective meanings of over a thousand social identities, places and actions in urban spaces using traditional methods such as questionnaires. We use representative samples from France and Germany. We then feed this data into a computational model that simulates how people perceive affectively and behave in urban environments. We empirically test these predictions by conducting experiments with participants immersed in virtual urban environments.

We have two preliminary findings. First, social identities (e.g., policeman, secretary, teacher, gang member) have similar affective connotations in French and German cultures. However, some differences exist. For example, power and positive feelings are less correlated for social identities in Germany than in France. Second, the symbolic distances between social identities in the cultural affective space affect how people expect them to keep physical distances in real space.

We expect the present project’s scientific impact to be high. First it integrates two theoretical traditions in social psychology (psychological: French PI; sociological: German PI) that have developed in quasi isolation since the 1950s. Here we merge the views that people’s behavior depends on their affective appraisal of the situation based on personal goals, motivations and cognitive processes of judgment, but also on the maintenance of adopted collective meanings from the larger social system. Second, the resulting theory of affective perception of the environment has numerous practical applications. As it predicts how people will behave in a given spatial context, ACT-space may serve as a tool for engineering spaces to regulate the flow of behavior (cf. crowded places, commercial spaces, public spaces) or for engineering robots that navigate the environment based on affective meaning, like humans do. ACT-space also predicts people’s expectations and preference for arranging things spatially, which can serve to design more appealing places, or serve to better understand social dynamics that are harmful (e.g., residential segregation). ACT-space can further model how people represent the environment affectively, which is useful for planning the impact of any changes made to the urban landscape (e.g., urban planning: where to build a park for maximum positive impact?). Third, the project lays the necessary groundwork for more advanced simulations in the future, like the use of agent-based modeling where many artificial agents following rules from ACT-space produce emergent phenomena able to explain social dynamics on a larger scale. Such modeling approaches have been applied frequently in recent years to better understand behavioral dynamics of cities (e.g., Batty, 2013), but they often suffer from unrealistic assumptions regarding psychological mechanisms of individual agents (see Schröder & Wolf, 2017, for discussion and a counterexample).

1. Blaison, C. (2024, Nov 12). La construction sociale des impressions [Talk]. LISN, Univ. Paris-Saclay, Paris.
2. Blaison, C. (2024, Oct 11). La construction sociale des impressions [Talk]. LPS, Aix-Marseille Univ., Aix-en-Provence.
3. Blaison, C. (2024, Apr 28). La construction sociale des impressions [Talk]. Forum des Sciences Cognitives, Univ. Paris Cité, Paris.
4. Blaison, C. (2024, Mar 28). Prédiction des impressions d’événements sociaux: perspective culturelle [Talk]. SNCF, La Plaine Saint-Denis.
5. Blaison, C. (2024, Mar 26). Jugement affectif en contexte spatial [Talk]. Univ. de Crète.
6. Dametto, D., Ziqiao, Z., Vieira, L., Schröder, T., & Blaison, C. (2024). How does LLMs combine information to form impression of social events? [Poster]. EADM Summer School 2024, Potsdam, Germany.
7. Noël, T., Blaison, C., Dametto, D., Dardenne, B., Schröder, T., & Vieira, L. (2024, July 13). Répartition des catégories sociales: connotations affectives culturelles [Talk]. 15th Congrès Int. de Psychologie Sociale, Bruxelles, Belgium.
8. Vieira, L., Dametto, D., Alexopoulos, A., Schröder, T., & Blaison, C. (2024, July 13). Au-delà de la valence des lieux: jugement affectif en contexte spatial [Talk]. 15th Congrès Int. de Psychologie Sociale, Bruxelles, Belgium.
9. Blaison, C. (2023). Distances dans l'espace des connotations affectives prédisent les distances physiques [Talk]. Journées Cognition Sociale, Univ. Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France.
10. Blaison, C. (2023, Sep 15). Affective judgment in spatial context. UNILAPS, Univ. Lausanne, Switzerland.
Blaison, C. (2023, Aug 25). Affective judgment in spatial context. PsyNCog, Univ. de Liège, Belgium.
11. Dametto, D., Vieira, L., Blaison, C., & Schröder, T. (2023). EACIS: Emergent Affective Configurations in Space [Talk]. Social Simulation Conference, Glasgow, Scotland.
12. Dametto, D., Vieira, L., Schröder, T., & Blaison, C. (2023). Feminine vs. masculine roles and identities [Poster]. EASP General Meeting, Krakow, Poland.
13. Vieira, L., Adamczak, R., Guimier, M., Delaunet, P., & Blaison, C. (2023). Social threats and physical distance [Talk]. 19th EASP General Meeting, Krakow, Poland.
14. Dametto, D., Vieira, L., Schröder, T., & Blaison, C. (2023). Charlemagne’s Legacy: A Consensus Analysis of Affective Meanings in French and German Culture. Social Psychology Quarterly, 01902725231205855. doi.org/10.1177/01902725231205855. (PsycINFO, Scimago-Scopus : Q1 Social Psychology)
15. Blaison, C. (2022). Affective judgment in spatial context: Orienting within physical spaces containing people and things. Social and Personality Psychology Compass [social cognition section], e12653. (PsycINFO, Scimago-Scopus : Q1 Social psychology, IF 2021 = 3.80)

What makes places in a city attractive? This question is of scientific interest and politically relevant, given current challenges faced by many major cities with a rise in populations, spiraling rents, and resulting increased social segregation between more and less attractive districts of the city. Such questions have been studied extensively in disciplines such as architecture, urban planning and economics. Here, we propose to address the deeper social psychological mechanisms that drive the emergence of collective representations of urban attractiveness (called here affective meaning of place), which we assume to underlie human decisions about residential location, modes of transportation, leisure activities, etc.
To this end, we propose to combine the first French PI’s expertise studying affective judgment of place using an experimental approach, with the German PI’s expertise studying affective dynamics of human communication using a computational modeling approach. We aim to develop and validate a mathematically formalized theory of how affective processes govern human perceptions, decisions, and behaviors in urban space. Capitalizing on major theoretical traditions in social psychology and sociology (field theory, consistency theory, social constructionism, affect control theory), we propose that personal and collective meaning-making processes generate affective force fields, which in turn constrain human behavior in the city. We will create a computer model called ACT-space (for affect control theory of urban space) that makes precise predictions about how humans perceive affectively and behave in urban environments. We will then use innovative Virtual Reality (VR) technology, in which the French participant has extensive expertise, to seek ecological validation of ACT-space.
The project comprises the following methodological steps: (1) compilation of an extensive dictionary of concepts and vignettes describing social interactions in cities, along with empirical ratings of their affective meanings derived from a survey of French and German respondents; (2) using data from (1) to parameterize a computational model (ACT-space) to predict the likelihood of specific human-environment interactions; (3) generating simulations with ACT-space to explore meaningful cross-cultural differences between French and German urban culture; (4) a series of vignette experiments to test semantic predictions from ACT-space; (5) a series of visual experiments to test spatial predictions from ACT-space; (6) compilation of a visual library of urban identities (avatars) and settings to be used in a VR environment; and (7) a series of experiments using VR technology to test behavioral predictions from ACT-space.